We were excited to visit this town in the jungles of the Cardamom Mountains. The community led system here is one of the oldest in Cambodia, and has helped to get the locals to stop poaching in the forest and instead focus on tourism income. The reality did not live up to our expectations however…
Day 150: Onwards to Chi Phat
After more porridge and muesli for breakfast, we were picked up on time and shuttled up to the bus station in a lovely minibus. We had a bit of a wait for the bus as they insist on getting you there early, even through the locals arrived much later – some of them after 7.45 when the bus was due to depart! We left only 15 minutes late though, which was pretty impressive, and then spent the next hour or so moving through the Phnom Penh traffic and stopping to pick up other people and cargoes. It was a full bus. As usual, we were the only ‘falang’ on board and got lots of odd looks from locals, and the kids got some handshakes.
Whilst it took a long time for us to get out of Phnom Penh we made pretty good time after that and would have made the 1pm last boat time if we hadn’t stopped for a lunch break at just gone 12. We were glad we didn’t have to eat at this one as we’d bought some bread earlier which we planned to eat on the boat. There were a few too many flies on the food here…
We arrived at Andoung Teuk just after 1pm. We needn’t have worried about missing the boat, as soon as we stepped off the bus, we only had a few seconds to look around and wonder ‘what now?’ before a chap appeared from the little shack we’d been dropped off at with a sign bearing our name. He offered us a seat and the chance to buy cold drinks and go to the loo, before taking us down to the boat.
It was just us for a private tour up the river. We had to board the boat across a wooden board, and then step down, which would have been easy, except for the heavy bags we were carrying. Wobbly!
The boat ride was initially blissful, a slow cruise up the river, most of us in the shade, with a semblance of a breeze and some mangrove forests to the side. Birdlife was rather shy at first, but we did spot some hornbills flying to the side 😊.
The journey is meant to take around two and a half hours we think, but about an hour and a half in we encountered difficulties. Our engine cut out. No worries – there’s a second, albeit smaller one, on the other side of the boat. Using this, we chugged upriver a little and called in at a brightly coloured riverside house, where some shouts brought someone out with some bottles of fuel. Cash exchanged hands, the bottles were poured in through the funnel, and we were off again. No drama right?
Wrong! Fuel was not the issue, and the engine cut out again. He tried fiddling with it a bit, and moved to the smaller one again. This one was clearly not the main engine for a reason though, and sounded very unhealthy. Soon, this one cut out too! At this point our driver, who had been very calm up to this point, swore (we don’t know Khmer, but we were pretty sure he was swearing anyway!) and lit up a cigarette, ignoring the fact that there was fuel all over the boat and his hands from the refill exercise.
Some tinkering, siphoning of fuel from the big one to the little, and more swearing later and we were on the move again. This was how we continued, with the larger engine coming back to life occasionally and moving us on, before dying soon after. It seemed to be properly dead about 200m from the town though, and we limped in with the stuttering support engine. We did at one point think that Chris would have to use the paddle to get us there, but we made it!
We had to jump off the front of the boat onto a plank on top of sticky mud though, which made for some mucky shoes and some precarious bag balancing. It was still very hot when we loaded up with the bags and followed our driver into town. He stopped at the end of the main street and pointed us down the road. Wandering down the street we had no idea where we were heading, but every time we stopped to consider how far we should be walking, a local waved us on down the road so we continued…
Finally we passed the CBET office, where some staff were in and waved us inside. We had booked accommodation online as we were keen to see what facilities the parents would have, rather than just being allocated a previously unseen homestay or bungalow on arrival. When we looked online, the Clouded Leopard Guesthouse seemed to have a pretty reasonable bathroom in a town with very basic facilities so we’d been pleased with our booking. On arrival though, we were told that the rooms were not in a fit state and that we’d be put somewhere similar instead. We weren’t bothered if it was the same.
The Mongoose was not the same though; totally made from bamboo with holes in the walls and floors and no sink (again! Although I think it was intentional this time). The mosquito nets were great though, and the beds comfy, so we settled in before heading back to the CBET for dinner. The food was uninspiring, but had lots of vegetables so at least it was good for us.
Back at the rooms it was still really hot, and the fans were rather ineffective through the nets. I was ok, and always feel really safe hidden in a mosquito net so I wasn’t worried about the holes in the floors and the bugs, but we knew this would all be a bit of a trial for Chris’s parents and couldn’t help but feel a bit bad for bringing them here ☹.
Day 151: A scorcher in the jungle
Sleep was not great. Not only was it warm, but at one point a coconut fell from the tree onto the metal roof which had us all wide awake as it sounded like an explosion in the silence of the night! Then the dogs were fighting and barking, seemingly running around under our hut at some point. From about 5am, the locals were all up and about, whizzing past on their mopeds too. Good job we were all in bed by 10pm last night! After all the bugs, floor holes, and the coconut incident we were super proud of our parents for not quitting and getting the next bus home, especially with a bug phobia 😊.
After freshening up, breakfast was mountains of noodles, fried rice and pancakes with banana, so we were all pretty happy. Free tea too 😊. We certainly won’t starve here.
By the time we’d packed up and readied ourselves, it was about 8.30am. We got the walking map from the lady on reception and followed the route down the main road back towards the river, looking out for dinner options on the way. There weren’t many, a couple of places that looked like you might get a fried rice, but nothing that convincing. Dinner at the CBET every night then! We followed the road around to the side, and went to walk down the path to the right to the river viewpoint.
After wandering the dirt road through houses, we ended up at the northern end of town – despite turning right, we’d gone left! No idea how that happened!! We were actually quite pleased as we had a long way to go and it was hotting up – we couldn’t get to the waterfalls for a swim soon enough!
As we wandered past the last few houses in town, some rather merry men (starting the New Year celebrations early?) on the veranda of one of the houses called us over to sample some of their drink. It was in a water bottle, but not water! We suspect it was some homemade rice wine, either way it was certainly strong for 10am!! One of their members was keen on picking people up. Evie was easy, then he tried Chris. He couldn’t lift him, but loved it when Chris lifted him, and loved it even more when I showed him the picture I’d taken!
Once we’d waved goodbye and continued up the road, he came past on the back of his wife’s (?) bike, waving and wobbling around so much he kept nearly making her crash! I feel like this will be one of our highlights here 😊. We love random interactions like this!
We skipped the turn to the first falls, planning to kayak to them another time. Further on, we turned down a side track. No signposts, and the map was very unspecific, but Maps.Me showed the path so we followed it.
Sure enough, we emerged on the riverside at a rocky area with a small cascade upstream. There were loads of locals seemingly doing their washing in the rapids about 50m up, but no one where we were.
The rocks here were super slippery, so not all of us made it into the water for fear of falling down! The water was glorious; so easy to get into – the perfect cure to the heat. We needed somewhere we could all swim though, and we soon realised that the locals were men, who do not normally do the washing, and that what they were washing seemed to be intestines… some floating bits of meat coming past convinced us that we wanted to be upstream!
Another kilometre upriver, up a totally exposed dirt track had us all in a sweat. We arrived at the top of the waterfalls, only to find that there was no water! Noooo!
Leaving the others in the shade, Chris and I went scouting for a pool, or any sign of the falls that should be here (one of the maps had named it ‘high waterfall’ so it had to be mildly substantial surely!?)
We found the top, and spotted a deep, shaded pool at the base of some rather lacklustre falls.
After winding our way down to it, we hung around there for hours, cool in the water under the tree. It was a fruiting tree of some kind, so the floor and pool were covered in fallen fruit, which smelled a bit rotten. A bit of a shame, but nothing was going to spoil our enjoyment of the cool water after our long, hot walk.
The falls coming over the edge were really warm, like a hot shower!
We headed for a fallen tree to sit and eat our lunch of hardboiled eggs, fresh mango and bananas. Leftovers from Phnom Penh. Luckily, it was enough to satisfy us in the heat. We hadn’t been sat long when Marilyn felt something on her leg and went to brush it off, it was stubborn so she tried to pull it off, thinking it was some weed. It was not! A massive leech was suckered onto her thigh! It stretched right out as she pulled it. Eew! We were all being really helpful and laughing as she panicked and yanked it harder again. It came off after a couple of tugs – a beast of a thing next to our pen knife! We were all glad we were out of the water and surreptitiously checked ourselves for unwanted friends…
By now it was around 2pm and still very hot. We were done with swimming though, and had drunk nearly all of our 7 litres of water! Time for the 3.5km hot walk back ☹. And boy was it hot!
We could have really done with some air conditioning to hide in when we returned. Instead we had to make do with cold showers and then a drink under the fan in the CBET restaurant. When we looked it up, it was 37 degrees here at 4pm. No wonder we were struggling! Too hot! It’s a few degrees hotter here than Phnom Penh or Sihanoukville – why?
By this point, we were all feeling a little less than enthused about our stay here. I was particularly disappointed as, being the booker, I always feel the pressure to take everyone to good places and feel like I’ve failed when everyone around me isn’t happy with my choice. Knowing it’s silly and that they’re all grateful for my planning work isn’t enough to make me feel better, which is daft I know.
We’d been expecting some mountains for a start (seeing as the town is in the Cardamom Mountains…) with cooler temperatures and set in the jungle. We’d hoped to be able to get into the jungle fringes from the town easily, but having walked for a couple of km, we’d seen very little jungle. It’s all a lot further out as the area surrounding the town has been cleared for farmland. Most the activities here are around trekking into the jungle, normally with a night or two sleeping out. These are not particularly cheap, so we’d planned to get a guide and do the jungles for one day. But that was when I thought that the Cardamom Mountains were actually mountains, so would be elevated and cooler, rather than this mildly undulating area which is about 5 degrees hotter than anywhere around!
In the end, we decided that four nights here was too much, and pulled our departure forwards, swapping a night here for one in an air conditioned room in Sihanoukville with a pool, before we head off to the island for sun, sea and sand! Yes please.
Dinner was much nicer tonight, with a slightly curried soup, and poached eggs cooked with onions and pumpkin (?). It was delicious and made us feel a bit better about eating here for the next couple of days. After some card games, we headed back for an early night, hoping we’d sleep better.
Day 152: Cooking Khmer style and fun on the river
Marilyn, Evie and I planned to do the cooking class this morning, so after breakfast at the CBET, we waited around for someone to tell us what to do. The lady in charge said after a while that they were having some trouble sourcing coconut for the coconut milk. A bit later she waved us into the office, which was a strange place to be doing cooking we thought, but followed her in anyway. Actually, she wanted paying, for everything on the trip, even though we hadn’t actually done all the activities yet. We had no cash on us and didn’t want to pay now anyway.
Finally one of the ladies we recognised from dinner and the bar arrived with some coconut, an hour late. Ah well, we’d just been chatting so no problem. Our first mission was to go to the local market with her to get some ingredients for the food. Discussions about what we would cook were brief, both Marilyn and I fancied doing something vegetarian, and love the curries so asked for the Khmer curry. The market is not large as it’s a small town, so there were only a couple of vegetable stalls to visit. Our chef picked up some veg, and we interjected and made suggestions about the ones we liked. We ended up with a massive bag of veg! Some eggs finished the order and we headed back to the CBET restaurant, seemingly we were going to use their kitchen, which only has one stove…
A mat was placed on the floor and we sat down to watch her make the chilli’s into a paste, and pound the lemongrass and spices in the pestle and mortar. She did let us have a little go and we peeled the veg.
Whilst we were sat there we could hear what sounded like karaoke, and repeated gunshots… It turned out this was karaoke and the other sounds were firecrackers. Today was the New Year and the celebrations had started in the morning! Walking back later we could see huge speakers in people’s gardens, with people sat around singing karaoke. There seemed to be a competition to be as loud as possible and drown out the neighbours!
Then she showed us how she was making the coconut milk (simply mixing the grated coconut with water, and squeezing the coconut in the water to make it white. The squeezed coconut was put aside). Then she basically cooked it herself whilst telling us what she was doing, including showing us the Knorr chicken stock cube she added! Haha!
It was then time for the lunch food to start being cooked as it was 11am, so we were pushed out of the kitchen; there wasn’t much else we could do right now anyway as the vegetables needed to cook for a while. We sat back down, expecting to be called back up. That didn’t happen, and we were served our lunch at the same time as the others were served theirs. Our three hour cooking class had lasted one and a half hours in the end. And it turned out that we’d chopped so many vegetables as they were using our curry to feed everyone! So basically, we’d chopped up their vegetables for lunch and paid for the privilege! Haha! No wonder it’s the cheapest cooking class I’d seen anywhere! It was delicious though 😊
After lunch, we’d planned to take kayaks up the river (and they’d included it in the bill they’d tried to get us to pay already), but at 1pm there was no one around as the office is closed 12-2pm. Then at 2pm when they returned, there were a load of new arrivals which they were processing, so we couldn’t get her attention until 3pm. As it’s a 5km paddle each way to the falls we decided we no longer had time to kayak, so asked about bikes instead so we could get to the falls that way. We didn’t fancy walking back up the road!
After being fitted with bikes and helmets, we launched off up the road for a swim, followed the sign to the falls which we’d ignored the day before and ended up back at the rapids of the other day, rather than at the falls by the island… We are not having much luck with directions here! Swimming was much easier in this spot above the rapids, where the locals swim though, with deep pools nearer the edge and wonderfully warm water. We stayed in the water for a couple of hours and so it was starting to get dark when we emerged and started to head back towards the sunset.
As we had to pay for the bikes, there was so much more to explore and it was a lovely temperature now, Chris and I decided to follow some of the Maps.me trails up to ‘Bald Mountain’. We couldn’t see anything that resembled a mountain, or even much of a hill, but there was supposed to be a lookout on the top, just a couple of km away, and we hoped to get there for the sunset. We rode off down some ridiculously bumpy dirt roads, and my saddle was the thinnest I have ever sat on – not comfy! The route started to climb slightly, and took us up into some sandy scrubland, where we could get glimpses of the sun through the gaps.
The route was hard to follow, with quite a few trails, so we had to double back a few times when we were heading in the wrong direction, but we were getting there, the sun was disappearing fast though! Trying to rush through the sand traps, I stacked it. The bike slipped, I tried to jump off it, my foot also slipped on the sandy slope and I ended up going down hard with the bike on top of me. Apparently I went down quietly, as Chris was still riding off ahead! He came back to help when I called out though. We pushed the bikes a lot after that as it was really sandy, and finally ditched them to walk faster to the top. We’d missed the sunset by this point, but there were some sort of views over the valley, and the sky went interesting colours (I prefer the post sunset skies anyway to the sun actually setting), so it was worth it.
Having gotten up to the top after sunset, we realised that we had little time to get back down the narrow sandy paths on the bikes in the dark – we had no lights… The bike down was uneventful, which was lucky as I couldn’t really see the ground well by the end so was guessing where holes etc were and hoping! On the dirt road back we were relying on the bike drivers spotting us with their lights, assuming they had them…
Even with the fall, we’d had fun – the first time Chris and I had gone off alone in months! We rejoined the rest in time for dinner and the usual evening serenade by the Tokay geckos (large geckos which make a sound like a squeaky dog toy! Seriously!)
We’d heard from other people through their guides that the karaoke was likely to go on late, and that if we walked down the main street we’d be offered free beers everywhere until we couldn’t stand! There was also talk of local dancing in the market area. As we walked back to go to bed at around 9pm everywhere was silent though… everything seemed to be over already. Perhaps the 10am rice wine was a bit strong!
Back on the boat and on to Sihanoukville tomorrow for our trip to the tropical island of Koh Rong Sanloem. Looking forward to it! Follow us there!. Or head back to our more sombre time in Phnom Penh learning about the Pol Pot genocides…